What is Historical

Literacy?

Historical Literacy as a Goal

Historical literacy is the goal of history education. It what history teaching and learning is about. “We need a concept of historical literacy to enable us to tell others, and perhaps, more importantly to remind ourselves, what is central to history education,” Peter Lee (2011, p. 64) has written. It is more than teaching and learning stories about the past. “Beyond this minimum, we look to a higher standard—historical literacy” (Perfetti, Britt, and Georgi, 1995, p. 4).

Students who are historically literate are fluent in the discipline as well as the subject matter of history. They can think historically and engage in discipline-based conceptual reasoning about the past. “Our goal should [be]…to give students access to the ‘intellectual heart’ or ‘experiential soul’ of a discipline. Education succeeds if it furnishes students with a sense of how the world appears to individuals sporting quite different kinds of glasses” (Gardner, 1999, p. 157).

Historical literacy is a relative term. We expect more of college undergraduates than of high school students, and more of both than of middle-grades and elementary school learners. Our purpose as history teachers is to help students reach more sophisticated levels of historical literacy over the course of their academic education.

What Should a Historically Literate Person Know and Be Able to Do?

The following quotes are from Downey and Long, Teaching for Historical Literacy: Building Knowledge in the History Classroom (2016).

“In the first place, to be historically literate, a person must be knowledgeable about the past….  Helping students construct conceptual knowledge [about the past] is…the major challenge facing history teachers.” (p. 7.)

“[A] pedagogy for historical literacy should help students understand that the past has relevance for the present. It should provide students with what Lee (2011) calls a “usable historical past,” one that is applicable to their own lives today.” (p. 12.)

“Historical literacy also can be defined in the traditional sense of a person being able to read and write.  In this respect, the goal of historical literacy is to enable students to read history texts critically, to write thoughtfully, and to engage in meaningful discussions about the past.” (p. 8.)

“To be historically literate, students must become fluent in the academic language of history, which is not the same as the language of the home or of the playground.” (p. 11.)

 

“Instruction for historical literacy must facilitate learning about the discipline as well as knowing historical content.” (p. 11.)

“A historically literate person must be able to think historically.” (p. 17.)

  • Gardner, H. (1999). The disciplined mind: Beyond facts and standardized tests, the K-12 education that every child deserves. New York: Simon and Schuster.
  • Lee, P. (2011). History Education and historical literacy. In I. Davies (ed.) Debates in history teaching (pp. 63-72). London and New York: Routledge.
  • Perfetti, C. A., Britt, M.A., & Georgi, M. C. (1995). Text-based learning and reasoning: Studies in history. Hillsdale, NJ and Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.